


Love Is...

by Anonymous



Series: Baby We're On Fire [6]
Category: That '70s Show
Genre: F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, No Angst, No Dialogue, One-Shot, couldn't think of a title and got lazy, just a lot of babbling, not exactly fluff but there's no angst, still not the sequel, then cleaned it up the next morning and inflicted it on you all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:21:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24115684
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Hyde and Jackie both have very different ideas about love. Somehow, it works out.
Relationships: Jackie Burkhart/Steven Hyde
Series: Baby We're On Fire [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1341085
Comments: 8
Kudos: 43
Collections: Anonymous





	Love Is...

**Author's Note:**

> I was so focused on making sure the notes came out right, I fucked up the summary. Dude.
> 
> Time. For. _Exposition! *crowd cheers*_
> 
> So, I wrote something when I was half asleep and eventually decided to tweak it and expand it and see if it was worth something, and here we are. This is just 1k-something words of these stupid babies having emotions.
> 
> Also, it occurs to me that people might be using screen readers, so line breaks are gonna be a little different now.
> 
>  **Timeline:** 1978, a few months after leaving Point Place
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** why must you hurt me in this way
> 
>  **Have you not read the rest of series but wanna read this anyway? Here's what you need to know!** This can actually kind of stand alone, technically? Anyway, Jackie and Hyde are 16 and 18 respectively, ran away from Point Place, and are now living the poor person's life in Indianapolis. Jackie is still in school, Hyde dropped out immediately, and skip the ending AN, it has a spoiler for _Endless Midnights_ and you might wanna go read that later.

There is no bed frame. There is no fitted sheet, no pillowcases. The mattress is itchy, and the blanket is stiff, and the weather is freezing, and Hyde is wrapped around a shivering form, waiting for their body heat to build up enough under the covers that they could be just a little less miserable.

This is a situation Hyde knows well, the lack of luxuries, the shared bed, the multitude of ratty quilts scrounged up from a thrift store. Back before Bud had left, back when Edna could fight through enough haze to try, it was how they’d spent their winters, all curled up together with the heat on as low as they could stand it, blankets piled so high that he couldn’t help but spend the first ten minutes just jumping into them.

Ma had always laughed. Dad had always cheered. Hyde had always exhausted himself and burrowed under the covers and listened to their songs or stories or games. Ma had had a nice voice.

They hadn’t been perfect, hadn’t even been good — screaming matches with increasing regularity, never enough food for dinner, and reflexes he shouldn’t have developed so soon — but they’d been fine until Bud left. It had been like a sign, that whatever they had been clinging to just wasn’t worth holding anymore. Edna never sang after that.

Love is a choice. Hyde knows that with certainty. It’s a decision, an ongoing effort, to take a spark and feed it. Love is not organic. It is not found in the wild, doesn’t grow in the sidewalks like dandelions breaking free. Love is built. It’s constructed and maintained — tweaked and tended like a car or a half-finished song. People don’t “fall out of love”, they just stop trying. They decide the work is too much, and they quit.

Bud had quit, deciding some new woman was worth more than his family. Edna had quit, deciding some new man was worth more than her son. Neither of them had ever liked trying, not when it was so much work to balance tipsy and drunk, high and trashed, parent and spouse and person.

Jackie curls just a little tighter, shakes just a little less, pushes herself just a little bit deeper into his arms. She is here, in this shoebox apartment with a drippy faucet and no real bedroom and shitty heating, and she is not planning her escape. _This_ is her escape, _he_ is her escape, him and his backbreaking job and his filthy jeans and his emotional constipation. She is the only one who has run towards him.

This is why Hyde knows he can love Jackie, _will_ love Jackie, because he wants to, because he can. This is why he knows Jackie can stop loving him if he gives her a reason to. Love is a choice, and she is his.

Hyde has given up on everything he’s ever wanted. He will not give up on her.

****—** **

The room is freezing and Steven is warm and she’s going to sleep in her favorite cashmere sweater and she doesn’t care. It’s just a sweater. It’s just a room. It’s just so amazing how much thoughts can change in so little time.

Jackie never knew mattresses could be itchy, never knew thrift stores sold pots and pans, never knew people intentionally turned down their heat in the winter. She is learning.

Apartments come in extra small. A headache is not a good enough reason to take an aspirin. Food doesn’t go bad the second the sell-by date hits. Money does not grow on trees.

There had been an adjustment period, a time when Jackie hadn’t really understood the life she’d chosen, hadn’t understood how far down the ladder she’d jumped. It had taken Steven breaking down to get her to realize that there would be no more going out to eat, no more specialized conditioner, no more replacing shirts because of a single hole. It had been terrifying, having him walk her through the numbers, just barely hanging on as he explained to her that if they stopped buying absolutely everything that wasn’t strictly necessary, they would probably get to eat every day that month. Jackie cut back on her homework and took extra shifts after that.

This is her life now, this shaky balancing act between poor and homeless where she can’t buy makeup or shoes or brand name soda, and she wouldn’t trade it for Burkhart manor for anything. It’s scary and it’s sad sometimes, but it’s better than before. She makes her own decisions, there are no appearances to keep up, and she never returns to an empty home. She burrows into Steven’s chest, content and slowly warming, and realizes that every time she’s been held in the last six months, it’s been Steven’s arms around her. She places her hands over his and he pulls her tighter and she has never felt so secure.

This is where she’d chosen to go, and this is where she chooses to stay, with this dirty, paranoid delinquent with terrible table manners and worse taste in music. This is the man she’s fallen for, against all odds, and she can’t say she’s disappointed by it.

Love happens. This, Jackie knows very well. It sneaks up on you, hiding in the most unexpected places and jumping out at the most unexpected times. It appears with little warning, a natural disaster lurking, waiting for the right moment to strike. It is an earthquake and its aftershocks, a storm and its eye, always powerful, always there even long after you think it’s faded.

Love does not die, even when you wish it to, even when you do all you can to kill it, love only shrinks, an ebbing tide, a waning moon, retreating and shriveling until you can convince yourself it doesn't exist anymore.

This is how she knows Michael had loved her, even as he stopped liking her. This is how she knows Steven loves her, even now when he cannot say it.

This is how she knows they will stay together, because she has always carried an ocean inside of her, and he has always made it rage.

**Author's Note:**

> So Hyde's view is: his parents _were_ in love, at least a little, at some point, but they got lazy and complacent and stopped caring, so when they started falling out of love, they didn't try to fix it, they just yelled at each other more. Therefore, love is a decision you can make, but also something you have to take constant care of, and that's the stance he has on his relationship with Jackie. He _can_ love her, and so he _chooses_ to love her, and so he will _continue_ to love her for as long as that choice is his to make and, as long as he doesn't give Jackie a reason not to, she chooses to love him back.
> 
> Jackie's view is: so this happened. Jackie is a romantic, she doesn't see love as a choice, she sees it as something that happens to you. It can change and evolve and devolve, but once it's there, it's there. True, passionate love that she's always wanted is like an ocean in storm to her, exciting and moving and impossible to ignore, able to exist as it is as long as there are waves in the water, unfading as long as there isn't a dead calm. Hyde always makes her feel, or think, or be, just by existing. And so, as long as she's also always causing him to feel or think or be with her existence, their love will never fade.
> 
> Both of them feel that Jackie — who isn't used to the terrifying life of being one emergency away from homelessness — living the terrifying life of being one emergency away from homelessness, is proof of their love; to Hyde that she has chosen to love him in spite of this and so it's safe for him to love her, to Jackie that there is no choice _because_ she loves him and he can't help but love her back.
> 
> This note shouldn't be this long but I wasn't sure the story conveyed what I wanted it to but I didn't want to spell it out like that when it's supposed to be from their POVs so here we are. I tried.
> 
> So the problem with the sequel is, _Endless Midnights_ was never supposed to get written in the first place. Like, full honesty. It was a thought that I couldn't get rid of, so I decided to try writing it out and got stuck. But I really liked the plot and wanted to finish it, so I figured I’d post a few chapters, get some feedback, then delete it off the site until it was complete.
> 
> That clearly didn’t happen.
> 
> Y’all liked it too much! I genuinely didn’t see that coming. So I didn’t get to be lazy and ignore it for months at a time, like what happens with most of my story ideas. And now there’s all this pressure in my head like, _you have to work on the sequel, people are waiting for the sequel, you’re only working 3 days a week now so you should be writing up the sequel_ and it SUCKS.
> 
> (especially because Jackie’s so different from me and now I have to put myself in her head space but I don’t know anything about makeup or cars or romance or post-miscarriage depression)
> 
> The point I’m trying to make is, I know the sequel is taking forever (and I always knew it would, but this is longer than even I expected), but it’s a lot harder than I thought it’d be and I really wanna do a good job. Apparently, I have a tough act to follow, and I don’t want to _Iron Man 2_ this thing. Sorry.
> 
> Also, it anyone has any prompts they wanna throw out, any questions they have that they want answered in the sequel, feel free to throw those my way. They might get the creative juices flowing. I never expected to write _Little White Pills_ until Athereal’s reviews (I loved all of them, btw), but I’m super glad I did. It helped churn this one out, actually.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for sticking around! I love every single one of you!
> 
>  **and another thing:** because I didn’t realize the implications I made just now. This series WILL NOT be deleted. Even if writers block wins and I’m not able to add anything else, (and I’m fighting a good fight here) what I have is staying up.
> 
> Also, because this was brought up a while ago by a few reviewers, Hyde and Jackie aren’t breaking up. _Broken Stars_ is kicking my ass, but I do know with 100% certainty that there will not be a break up plot line, rest assured.


End file.
